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Jim and Stan Thompson
Luna, NM
Interview: May 13, 2011
Jim and Stan Thompson are brothers. Jim, the oldest, was born in Luna on January 22, 1938, and has been involved here most of his life. Stan was born in Silver City, NM on June 18, 1949, but grew up in Luna. Stan is a triplet with two sisters. They are the youngest in the family. We are interviewing both Stan and Jim at the same time so we will designate who is talking as we unfold their experiences. Remember as you read that Jim is eleven years older than Stan so while Stan was 8 years old playing in grade school, Jim was 19 and out of high school.
The family
Stan: Our dad was Patrick Thompson. He was born in 1911 in Indiana. Our mother was Helen Laney Thompson. She was born in Luna in 1914 and lived here most all her life, until we moved to Mesa. I don’t know how my dad found this country, but I am sure Mom and Dad met in this area.
Our grandpa (mother’s father) was William Laney and he came to Luna with his dad at an early age, about 1885 or 1886. They were the third or fourth family here in the valley. When he grew up he married our grandmother, Edna Adair Laney.
There are eight kids in our family. We have an older sister, Lavonne Shelton who lives in Snowflake. Jim is next. Then we have Patricia, who lives in Albuquerque, NM, a brother, Lionel that passed away, then our sister, Myrna, who is now living in Luna. Then there are the three triplets, my two sisters Sandra and Susan, and myself. Susan lives in Phoenix, but spends May through September in Luna. I live here now, and Sandra has passed away. That is our family.
Mother taught school as a teenager
Stan: Our mother taught school when she was in her teens. She lived in Shelby Laney’s old house. That’s the old house down (from Community Center) on the right, where she spent a lot of her growing up years. After her mother died, she would ride horseback or walk over the mesa to the Spur Ranch area, and she taught school out there. She would come back and forth by herself those six or seven miles. She said sometimes she would do it two or three times a week and sometimes stay out at the school. She was fifteen or sixteen years old at that time. The school students were from the families that ranched in the Spur area and she had ten or fifteen kids almost every day. Her little schoolhouse was different from the Dillon school. Her school was an old log house up one of the little canyons northeast of Jerry Laney’s house. The frame and old logs are still there. We took her out there to see that old school just a few years before she passed away. She had a great life. It was hard but she was a pioneer.
Mom’s garden
Jim: We lived in a house catty-corner across from the old store where Bill and two of my sisters have trailers right now. Mom always had her garden where Myrna’s triple-wide is, straight out in front of the old store. Mom was something else! She grew enough food for us to last us a whole year. She’s the only one that took care of it. I can remember her trying to get me out there a few times but there always seemed to be a fish to catch.
Stan: We have some old pictures of Mom. We were triplets and we had real diapers in those days. We still don’t know how she survived, but there is a picture of her hanging diapers on the line behind our old house and there are probably twenty or thirty lines of diapers just frozen solid. I don’t know how she did it. The snow in those days was really heavy.
Dad’s work
Jim: To earn a living my father worked for a mechanic in Glenwood. Then he worked down at the Santa Rita mine in Chino as a shovel operator. He worked on the tunnel down in the Salt River going into Superior as a shovel operator. Then he bought his own equipment in 1951, and worked for at least ten years up into the’ 60s.
Papa took care of us
Stan: Mom’s dad, William Laney, was a great man. He was “Papa”. He took care of us when our dad was away working. My mom said that he was her strength and her salvation as a young woman with a bunch of kids. He helped her through all the hard times. He was kind and caring. He helped a lot of people here in Luna. He really had an influence on this town. His life wasn’t easy either. He was a hard worker and very civic-minded. He was involved in everything.
Jim: He was on the draft board until the day I became eligible for a draft; that day he quit.
Grade School in Luna
Stan: When we were in school here there were about 60 or 70 kids in this school in first through the eighth grades. We went to school in this building (Community Center) until the eighth grade. We had a great time growing up. The kids came to our house and we played night games nearly every night. Our house was the center of the action and we just played games. It was so neat! Papa had an old wood shed outside of his house and we spent hours and hours playing basketball and shooting baskets on an old iron hoop out there on the front of that old shed.
Stan: This part (of the school building) was our cafeteria and we’d just walk up and get our food right here. Many times I would have to sit right here because I couldn’t go out to recess until I ate my cottage cheese. My teacher, Mrs. Barrow, would sit across the table and stare at me. She’d say, “You’re not going to recess because you are not eating your cottage cheese”. And I’d say, “Well that’s fine because I am not going to eat it”. So we’d sit here until recess was over and it was time for class. I sat here many a day watching the kids outside playing at lunch recess, because I wouldn’t eat cottage cheese.
Jim: Same way with me. I’d take my plate back with green beans on it and Mrs. Pegues was the cook. So she heated up the green beans again and made me go out and sit at the desk to eat them. I didn’t eat a one. The next day I had another plate of beans. The third day Mom found out about it. She was the kindest, gentlest woman you ever saw until she got a little bit ticked. She was a little ticked that day. They didn’t put green beans on my plate any more. I couldn’t eat them until about two years ago, when I finally got one down.
Stan: I still haven’t eaten any cottage cheese.
A great place to grow up
Jim: I think Luna was the greatest place in the world in which to grow up. I got in a lot of trouble. My grandpa used to call me “Jimmy don’t”, because he said the second word always had to be don’t. In those days your parents would just turn you loose. There was no danger from strangers. Man, we’d hit the Frisco River, and go up past the bridge. There was something to do all of the time. Everybody turned their milk cows out on the forest. We would run all the milk cows into the rodeo arena (soon as they had that built) and ride everybody’s milk cows. Minnie Reynolds caught me one day and boy, I got in trouble.
Stan: Our mom was a sweet, kind lady. Our whole house evolved around her. She was just so easy- going. She was good with us and she trusted us. We knew we had to live according to how she lived and we could never do anything to disappoint her. That’s how I looked at it.
Chores for young people
Stan: My biggest chore when growing up was chopping the wood and getting the chips in at night and cutting the weeds. Then I had to feed our horses, and stuff like that.
Jim: My “papa” started me on that old Ford tractor of his when I was eight years old, plowing, planting, mowing, and raking. I loved that.
Stan: I never had to milk. Jim had to milk. When I was tiny I’d go with him up to the barn behind our “papa’s” house. That was the two-story house on the corner that is there right now. Jim was born there.
Stan: Dad started teaching me to drive the cat (bulldozer) when I was about eight by letting me push dirt, and moving the cat from job to job for him. He’d tell me, “Just take off and follow this road”, or he’d point at a pine tree on the side of a distant hill, and he’d say, “Keep going toward that tree and I’ll be on the other side of that hill”. I would take off alone for hours at a time. He’d say, “Don’t kill the engine when you get to a rough spot, just gear down, idle down and ease over the rocks and avoid washes”. I’d felt proud being by myself and cutting across country. He also had me driving a pickup and other vehicles for him when I was eight or nine years old. We had to, because he had no one to help him. He’d take the pickup and move the house trailer and I’d move the dozer for him. It was quite a good way to grow up. You got so you didn’t fear. I loved being out of doors!
Jim’s high school years
Jim: I went to high school in Reserve. We went back and forth on that old bouncy school bus. They paved the road the summer I got out of high school. Mary Fuentes was the bus driver. Boy, she’d tell you to sit down and shut up and that was exactly what you did. The Jones boy didn’t one day, and she stopped the bus, got up and grabbed him and threw him off the bus and went on to Reserve. He got to school okay because somebody picked him up. If that happened today she’d be gone. That was the quietest bus you ever heard after that. He never argued with her again, and he was the biggest boy on the bus.
The bus always made it to school. The snow never stopped us. When it snowed heavily we could hear the blade go by our house early in the morning. Arment Mengus always had the road open, always.
I remember the school cafeteria in Reserve, how horrible it was, until Mary and Raymond Fuentes started cooking. They’d drive the bus, and then do the cooking. Gosh, everybody in the country wanted to eat there. It was the best food you ever ate!
Jim: We had a biology teacher in Reserve named Merle Garfield. He said if any of us were crazy enough to bring a rattlesnake to school he would show us how to milk it and get the venom. So Horace and Melburn Swapp and I went up the Frisco a little ways. We knew where there were rattlesnakes. We caught two of them. The next morning I didn’t want Mary Fuentes (bus driver) to hear them rattle so I wrapped my coat really good around the bottle I had them in and took them to school--on the bus. They are still over there I think in formaldehyde.
Stan: Yes, they are still on the shelf in the science room.
Jim: When they built this school building (now the Community Center), the contractor hired a bunch of the boys that were my age. I was still in high school and I graduated from high school in ’55. So it was between’ 51 and ‘55. My job was mostly shoveling sand to make cement, then riding over to Reserve to get more sand. It was pretty clean sand and it did a good job. I helped put the roof on with hot tar and paper. We had a man working with us named Crow. He was a really good magician and he was always pulling stuff on us up on the roof. He kept it interesting all the while we were working.
Stan’s high school and college years
Stan: My dad moved us, the triplets, Myrna and my mom, to Mesa, Arizona when we were twelve or thirteen. We went through high school there. When we moved to Mesa, I was heartbroken. I missed this country. We lived in Mesa during our high school years. We did usually get to come back to Luna during the summers. I went to college in Tempe at Arizona State University. I wanted to come back to pine trees so after graduating, I moved to Pinetop/Lakeside in 1976 to teach school. I started my Spanish teaching and coaching career at Blue Ridge High School. I taught twenty-five years at Blue Ridge, seven years in Utah, and three years at Reserve High School in Reserve, NM.
We kept our land here in Luna that Papa had given us, so three years ago we came back to Luna full time. I taught Spanish at Reserve High school for three years and coached the basketball team. I am retired now. It is my 35th year teaching and that is long enough.
The friends we remember
Jim: My best friend ever was Archie Fuentes and he has passed away. Roland Peters has also passed away. Walter Hoosier and Flynn Udall are still alive. The ones that used to go fishing with me are dead now except for Walter Hoosier. So I guess I am just hanging on.
Stan: The friends I remember were Chuck Adair, Doug Adair, Lynn Adair, and Mark Barrow. All of them are still alive. In our elementary class we had seven kids. I still see some of them from time to time. Steve Hulsey was a year older than me. A lot of the kids we grew up with still come to Luna in the summer time. We chuckle and we talk a lot about things that went on. I’ll have a memory about something and I’ll talk about it to somebody, then his story reminds me of what really went on. Sometimes our memories are not always accurate. There were a lot of kids that came over here from Springerville who stayed with grandparents in the summer. They were good friends. It was a good time. We spent a lot of time out in the forest.
Mom and the outhouse
Stan: I’ll tell you a funny story. We had an outhouse and then we finally got indoor plumbing. When we had a shower and facilities inside, we were excited. One day, after we had moved to Mesa, we were spending the summer here in Luna in 1963. My mom decided that she was embarrassed to have that old outhouse sitting there by our house in Luna, so she decided to burn it down. We got stuff pushed up all around it and lit it on fire. It was in the hot dry summer time, and here comes the Forest Service truck, just flying off the hill. They came in with their lights flashing and said to Mom, “Now what building is this that’s burning?” She wouldn’t tell them. She wouldn’t say this is an outhouse. “Oh, we are just burning some brush and old boards”, she said. Nobody knew it was our outhouse. When it was gone she was glad.
Papa’s funny sayings
Stan: When the three of us were little kids, Papa would let us ride on the tractor with him out on the Spur Ranch where he had his crops. He grew a lot of oats and corn. He’d take us on that tractor and I remember him saying, “Well, when you drive, the main reason you are driving is to keep it between the fences, and you are okay”. He said funny things like that all the time. He told my sister Sandra one time, “If you can catch that calf and we can get him in this car, you can have him and take him home as a pet.” He’d let her chase calves all over the place.
The deer and the mountain lion
Jim: Let me tell you a little story. We were taking the cat (dozer) from one site to another out by Centerfire and Stan was with me. We went over a ridge and started down a hill. Stan was sitting on the armrest, and he kept jerking on my sleeve and saying, “Jim, Jim.” Finally I kicked the clutch out and said, “What are you doing?” And he said, “Look at that.” There were two bucks and they had a mountain lion in flight. They were hooking at him on every jump, and he jumped into a big pine tree. Nobody believed us when we told them about it, except for Mr. Allred from Glenwood. “Yes, sir”, he said, “I have seen it myself. They sure put that lion up a tree.”
Stan: I can remember standing at the base of that tree and Jim telling me to stay there and wait until he could get Daddy and bring the pickup. That lion was looking down at me from a limb up there snarling at me. I said, “No I am not staying here.” I was scared to death that morning. That was a sight! The lion was gone by the time we got the pickup back up there.
An orphaned fawn
Stan: We did find a fawn one time. We kept it in our house. It was a tiny baby fawn and his mother had been shot. He was so tiny he couldn’t stand up. He was just about dead from not eating. We all milk fed him and my mom fed him and took care of him. We kept him in our house until he got big enough to turn loose. Then we put him out in the yard and the dogs started chasing him, and so we took it up into the forest and let it loose.
A wandering doe
Jim: When I was growing up there was a doe that was gentle. It would show up at the school in Alpine and at the school here .It was the same doe. One year she had one fawn. The next year she had two fawns. Come hunting season somebody would catch her and tie a red rag around her. When I was here the deer were numerous, like the elk are today.
The antelope chase
Jim: I’ve got to tell you one more thing about Stan. One time he came in where we were working, and he was scared to death. An antelope had followed him.
Stan: Two grown antelope were after me and they came right up to me, two of them. I had gone back to where we were camped to get some stuff for my dad. The grama grass was real high and I had this little straw hat on me, and I guess they saw that hat bouncing up and down and here they came. They just kept coming, then I’d stop and they’d stop. If I started walking they’d walk. Just back and forth for a good hour. I was scared to death by the time I got to where they were working.
Rattlesnakes at the hot springs
Stan: There are hot springs in the Frisco Canyon before the Box, east of Luna. There used to be kind of a “resort”, as my mom called it. She said the people would take wagons and go down there and soak in those hot tubs. They had a bunch of tubs built then where now there are just the two. My mom said that when she was a little girl, they never understood why, but she said they had a cabin built for them to sleep in across the creek by the springs, and they always slept on bunks that were hung by rope from the rafters. She said, “Now I understand it was because of the snakes.” That canyon was really infested with rattlesnakes at one time. She said people would stay down there for days. Now we go down there all the time on our four-wheelers and put our feet in the hot water.